I have one question for the Fairphone devs after I watched the video below.
/e/OS sounds great. But usually it’s a bad idea to ditch your vendor’s Android ROM. Because the vendor ROM also gets security updates related to e.g. the Qualcomm SoC. Which often cannot be redistributed due to licensing or simply because they’re closed-source blobs in the vendor’s ROM.
Does the collaboration between Fairphone and /e/OS mean that you get the same treatment for these closed-source updates from e.g. Qualcomm?
Can’t speak for /e/, but I’m quite sure LOS includes the firmware updates by pulling the blobs from the FPOS updates.
See a few references to LOS dev below:
just comparing the images (payload_dumper), partition contents, shasums
Some users being on /e/ had voice calling difficulties, while the OS version seemingly was the same, but modem/dsp…-partitions can differ depending on when they last flashed stock rom. So the resoution was to include the other device partitions into the /e/ ROM too.
dk1978 does this for LineageOS 0.17/0.18 since spring 2020, as he wrote in the main threads for those versions in this forum, /e/ just was late to include it and realize the problems if you don’t distribute them. The partnership with fairphone should have it covered, but my impression is qualcomm is friendly to the firmware blobs being public as wifi chipset blobs are on github for a long time by qualcomm devs. This is how linux distributions get their fix for the Atheros line.